


Will I be alone?

by Ruta



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Forbidden Love, Pre-Series, Tragic Romance, badass woman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 19:23:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17330906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruta/pseuds/Ruta
Summary: Do you ever think of me? When we were young and happy and with the world at our feet? A shining and flourishing future of opportunities and challenges? Do you ever think about what should have been? Where would we be if on that fateful night -"Don’t spend a day without thinking about it," it reaches her, far and near, his voice.





	Will I be alone?

  
She shouldn’t be there. Months of preparation, stalking and the only thing that he has tried to avoid for all that time has occurred. The air in the room is stale, smelling of old and ink and mothballs. Olaf counts the seconds that separate him from ruin. How long will it take before the fire set in the basement reaches the ground floor and the wing of the library in which they are located? Before the smoke fills the corridors and she notices what's happening?

"You shouldn’t be here," he says in his most arrogant tone, the one he uses to mask fear and insecurity. Why is she there? The report expressly stated that –

"Just like you," she replies, without taking her eyes off the book she is reading. "I suppose it’s yet another proof of my extraordinary fortune." The sarcasm has a different sound when it comes out of her lips, especially if accompanied by the grimace that now frowns her thin mouth. The dry noise with which she shuts the book resounds like a shot in the silence of the night surrounding them and covers the stentorian sound of the beat that his heart has jumped, as soon as he recognized the title on the cover. After all, recovering that damn book it’s the initial reason that pushed him into the huge labyrinth that is the Snicket library.

Precious seconds pass without her adding anything else or deigning him the least attention. He almost hears the crackling of the advancing fire from the heart of the house and the violence of his act clashes with Kit's unusually resigned appearance. He has never seen her that way since he knows her, namely since she was a little girl, skinny and bespectacled, devouring books with the voracity of a shark and responding to the abuses by fighting with a tongue sharper than a stiletto.

More minutes and she still doesn’t look up from the book in her lap. There are no artificial lights except that of the table lamp lit in their favorite corner, with the globe lampshade supported by two brass albatross.

"You don’t understand. You have to leave. We both have to."

He cannot avoid the little nervous tic of his mouth and when she finally looks at him, she stares with eyes full of contradictions: dismay and quiet acceptance and yearning.

"You did it finally." 

"Did what?" He would like to laugh - the new and bewitching evil laugh that he has perfected in the last few months since they split up - and deny, pretend. However with her it would be futile.

He watches her and knows every thought that is going through her mind. She is calculating, just like him: the remaining time, possible escape routes, the necessity or not of a physical confrontation.

Kit rouses with a deep sigh. She seems to have found some of her combativeness and her tense face is ignited by a fury that makes her desperately dear to him.

"I was hoping we wouldn’t get to this point, but I'm afraid I have no alternative. We both made a choice and it's time to accept and learn to live with it."

He easily grabs the explicit subtext. After this night their paths will definitely separate.An anger identical to hers snatches him, a black abyss that swallows everything else. "And whose fault is it?" He accuses her. 

"Do you really believe that by destroying my family, you will get what you are looking for?" She shakes her head, her messy hair falls in waves scattered in front of her eyes and his hands are wary for the desire to place them behind her ears. "Revenge is never the solution, Olaf."

"A family for a family. A house for a house." He holds his arms folded behind his back and gives her a sneer that is a children's bogey, but that doesn’t seem to scratch her composure in the slightest. "It seems fatally right."

"So you're going to kill me too?" She asks point-blank, in no uncertain terms. Is not that one of the qualities that made him fall in love with her? Her resilience, her inability to back away from danger, her resourcefulness, her verve? She resolutely addresses his gaze, with no trace of compassion for the turmoil she has just caused. "It would destroy them. My death. You know it's true. Minimum effort for the most effective result."

 _But it would also destroy me._ A part of what he is experiencing must show through because suddenly she is in front of him and she is hesitantly stretching a hand towards his cheek, a gesture repeated a thousand times, a habit that has become banal due to the custom with which they used to exchange actions of that kind.

 _No longer_ , a cruel voice whispers in his ear and he turns away from her hand, inviting and illusory, as if she wanted to slap him. 

Faced with rejection, her pain is not a noisy explosion, but it curls up in the edge of her hardened eyes. "Do you hate me so much?"

"It is not you that I hate, but what you represent." Truth is neither merciful nor compassionate, but it’s the only kindness that he can allow himself to grant to her right now.

Kit nods with and inscrutably definitive, closing expression. "And I hate the person you're becoming. You're a good man. You could be noble, like your father."

"Don’t talk about my father!"

"I loved him too, you know. I hate what my brother did, but I understand the reasons that led him to act that way."

"The end that justifies the means," he growls, feeling an anger that not even her presence can stop, a restlessness that nothing can calm down. "You and your nobility. You and your hypocrisies, your half-truths. What about the side effects of your actions? You say you act for the good, but who has decided that the good of some is more important than the good of others? Who has established that forgiveness is granted only to a chosen and fortunate few?"

When she puts one hand on his chest, this time he doesn’t retract and puts his on top of hers. "It's not too late yet. You could always come back." 

They both stare at the proximity of their overlapping hands with mournful fascination. And it really took so little? So little time to make strange what was more natural and simple between them?

"I know I could," he replies unstressed and adds nothing else. He knows she will read between the lines, she will understand. For a moment he would like for Kit to not know him as well as she knows him, but it would be like wishing the impossible, as the sun doesn’t rise and set every day or the sea becomes a placid expanse free of the tides that characterize it.

"You don’t want to," she replies in the same cold, impersonal tone. "So it's like that."

"Revenge is all I'm looking for," he whispers in her ear, leaning forward, lips pressed against her lobe. "I don’t want anything else."

She withdraws as if she had hit her. In a sense it’s exactly what he did. "This is a goodbye."

"No, dearest," he promises with ineluctability, moving his hand behind her nape and getting ready to knock her out. "Just a see you later." 

When she wakes up, under a blanket of distant stars and on a bed of grass bathed by the night dew, Kit Snicket is alone in the garden while her childhood home burns up again, by a fire set by the love of her life.

The cycle of her life without him begins like this, with the theft of a gift book.

* * *

The next time their paths cross, both are taken aback by that chance encounter.

She is on the run, escaped by a hair from enemies too powerful and is traveling through the underground tunnels to reach the house of an ally, seeking protection as long as she will not recover completely from the wounds that have been inflicted on her. He is about to commit the second crime that will condemn him in her eyes. (He will fail, but that is not the point. The point has never been to succeed in his evil intent, but the incontrovertible nature of his criminal attempts.)

Olaf observes her from head to toe with a predatory attitude and Kit is too tired to worry about how she must look. "I thought you dead."

She moves a hand to reject his words. "Widespread and obviously incorrect opinion." Before he adds something, she precedes him. "I know what you're going to do."

His challenge grin is painfully familiar. "Do you want to try and stop me?" He asks as if he is not waiting for anything else.

" _Take care of him_ ," she recites from memory and feels her throat clench with tears that she will not cry. " _My boy is stubborn and proud, vain as few, but he has a good heart. Take care of him._ Your father told me that the day you gave me your mother's ring. I never returned it to you."

He is pale and seems dazed, as if he is fighting the effects of a powerful sleeping pill. When she unbuttons her jacket to pull out the chain with the ring in question, the sight is enough to awaken him from his stun. He seems to want to touch her, but at the end he crosses his arms behind his back and resolutely avoids her gaze.

"I don’t want you to do it," she hears him say and she rearranges the chain under her blouse, in the place that belongs to it, near her heart.

"All these years and for what? Did you find what you were looking for?" She doesn’t expect an answer and is surprised when he offers her one.

"I had found it." His eyes are surrounded by deep shadows and haunted by her own torment. "I held her against my chest and then let her go." 

The mouth suddenly dry, Kit moistens her chapped lips and savors the bitter taste of loss that is not necessarily death, but adversities and sufferings and life choices incompatible. "The past is hidden in memories. The future is built on hopes."

"You haven’t changed," he says and he addresses her with a smile that is sad and angry together. "You're the same."

"No more," she contradicts him. "The whole world has changed and so I had to do."

The pain in the side is increasing exponentially, is accompanied by the one that pierces her chest, that fills her lungs. Under her open hand, she feels the blood-soaked fabric.

_Do you ever think of me? When we were young and happy and with the world at our feet? A shining and flourishing future of opportunities and challenges? Do you ever think about what should have been? Where would we be if on that fateful night -_

"Don’t spend a day without thinking about it," it reaches her, far and near, his voice.

She opens her eyes suddenly and that's how she discovers that she has spoken her thoughts aloud. In the flash of surprise and vulnerability that is crossing his face. And so, deprived of her armor and made impulsive by reasons that go beyond her will, she realizes that she is dying.

She gasps and while awareness overwhelms her, she leans against the brick wall. Trying to catch her breath, the weight of her body multiplied by fatigue, she tries to keep herself standing on unstable legs. Her head whirls.

"Kit." His hands rest on her shoulders, the alarmed way he is studying her in the dim light of the tunnel. "You're bleeding. You're hurt." His voice is dangerously low and hoarse, it promises threats. "What happened? Who dared -"

"They introduced themselves as your mentors. They invited me to dinner." She tries to smile, but the attempt fails miserably. "I couldn’t refuse."

"Silly girl. You know what they are capable of and the same you went. Why?" The anger is barely contained. It has already transformed him, making him a demon of destruction.

Afterwards, Kit will disclaim herself for that interlude of weakness and fragility, entrenching herself behind the excuse of the wound, of the feverish state in which she was. Long held words, unexplored lands not because they are bumped by hidden pitfalls, but because they have no way out. 

One arm behind her shoulders, another behind her knees. Kit lets herself be lifted up and rests her head in the corner of his neck.

"I wanted to try and understand," she admits in a murmur. "If I had understood them, maybe I would have had more hopes of -" she stops abruptly and rubs her nose against his jaw. Light as a waft of wind from the south, his breath touches her cheek. "It no longer matters. I sent a message to Jacqueline. She will send someone to pick me up. I just have to wait for the reinforcements."

Olaf continues to walk and Kit is lulled by the slight swing of his walk, the scent of his colony, the tingling of his beard against her forehead. She absent-mindedly notes directions. Right left. Twice left and then once again right.

"Nobody will come."

She re-opens her eyes. "You know about the party." It's not a question, not even a statement. It's something halfway between the two, ambiguous as has become their relationship.

"I have my informants," he replies, insolent and arrogant.

"You were going there. Why?"

"To kill the traitors."

She is not new to the nonchalant pain that such statements, especially because made by him, procure her. She should have gotten used to the backlash they produce inside her, brushing against the most secret strings of her heart, sharpening thier teeth and nails against that soft mass that were her feelings for him, no matter how stubbornly she tries to stifle it as the most damaging and harmful of fires. Pain has filled the empty spaces created by his absence.

She agitates a little in his arms, but her voice shows no traces of the shock and betrayal she feels. "They never betrayed. None of us did apart from you."

His hands tighten around her shoulder, around her right knee. "Do you insist on your lies?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The poison dart," he grinds his teeth. "It was yours."

"I never made a secret of it."

"Who threw the dart that killed my father?" He asked urgently. "Who performed the atrocious crime?"

"You know the answer."

"Yes, I know it now. Do you dare still defend them? After all they did?"

"The bold are those who dare and those who dare fall from the highest peaks."

The darkness falls on her eyelids like a guillotine, the emptiness fills her ears. When she wakes up, she is disoriented. She expected to be on a meadow with the stars as the only companions. Instead, she is lying on a cot, medicated with gauze wrapping her chest. Sitting at the edge of the cot, he watches her with ruthless and tender eyes, in the oxymoron he has become for her. In his hand it’s the chain with the ring he gave her in another life, when he promised himself and the world to her. The feeling she sees in his eyes makes her lose a heartbeat.

"Where is your heart?" She asks and is not surprised when he leans over to hook the chain again. His fingers are cold and raise her chin.

"Here," he says. "Exactly where I left it. And yours?"

In a garden. In an old book of poetry that he stole from her, shamefully taking advantage of her induced state of unconsciousness. In an abandoned collection of poisoned darts. In the ring she wears around her neck. In the tormented eyes of the man kneeled beside her and who looks at her with the eyes of the past, eyes where the laughter of lost friends, ghosts and regrets chase each other.

It’s a moment, the impulse dictated by a feeling too long buried. The rancorous man gives way to a lonely and sad boy. Her hands are wary of touching the familiar and alien face, smoothing out the new wrinkles on his forehead. Kit sticks out before reason silences instinct. She stretches her neck, tilts her head and with slow, deliberate precision rests her lips against his. Not a jolt, not a tremor through him. No surprise. His mouth remains motionless and hard under hers for seconds long years. The consistent loss of blood made her head light, but now she feels like an aerostatic balloon.

She has always been good at holding her breath. Diving, poisoned darts, bibliophily. This was her before him. For a time she has been a girl who wore elegant clothes and wore diamonds around her neck. She no longer wore an elegant dress and a jewel from that night. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t have peace until the end of the schism, until she was reunited with her loved ones. The promise becomes inconsistent in the light of the new revelations of this evening, in the face of the umpteenth refusal that burns more than a thousand fires set at the same time. When she moves away, she puts her forehead against his shoulder and gives a deep sigh. It is painful to remember how it was before and compare it with the now.

Before his the arms wouldn’t remain helpless against his hips, but firmly tightened around her body. His hand would caress her nape, recline it for more access to her throat. There would have been kindness and passion and that comfortable warmth that had convinced her that she had finally found her Ithaca after a thousand shipwrecks and vicissitudes.

"I will not kiss you, not tonight. Not when you think it will be the last thing you will do." His smile is bitter and dark. "Later you would regret it."

"It's the end."

"Not yet." Olaf speaks quickly, accompanying her in her sleep. "It will not end until each of them has felt the pain and despair that I constantly feel. As long as each of them has not tasted the bitter taste of my revenge. It will not end until each one of them has lost everything they care for, seen every beautiful thing turned to ashes, their houses reduced to rubble and life will not become but a slow agony, all around their solitude, madness and ruin."

After, when she is alone again and the fever is relegated, the pain in the side faded into something bearable, a new message reaches Jacqueline to warn her of the imminent danger.

_Olaf knows._

* * *

The first time Kit visits the Baudelaire’s home is also the last.

Kit observes that massive and rich house, full of sun and laughter and poetry and plants. She observes its opulence critically. The curtains are too light for her tastes and there are too many carpets and flowers and too few paintings. She cannot help thinking about everything she has lost. To weigh the sacrifices and to ask herself if it was really worth it.

She cannot avoid thinking for a moment, just a moment, how profoundly unjust and unfair it is. In an alternative world, that house could be hers. It's a moment. Then Beatrice comes towards her, holding out her hands and welcoming her with a smile full of affection and she is radiant and proud and courageous and tenacious. She is the sister she never had (and who she will never have). The mother who she has always aspired to become. A woman fulfilled and with a veil of melancholy that makes her only more human and true. Behind her Bertrand is carrying a dark haired girl wearing a velvet dress and leather shoes.

They are adorable to behold and the instinct to protect them is overbearing and fierce.

Her brothers are missing, one dead and the other a creature walking under unknown skies in search of answers to his endless questions.Kit accepts Beatrice's embrace and the tea that Bertrand pours them into a flowered porcelain set. She weaves Violet's hair as Esmé taught her to do years ago and exchanges puns that Lemony would be proud of. She and Bertrand declaim citations from their favorite authors, challenging each other to recognize the work they belong to.

It is an afternoon of light and perfume and in the twilight of what has been, she accepts with quiet determination the alternative of what should have been. And after so many losses, grief and acts of courage, yet another heartbreak has a familiar flavor. After surviving the first, remaining standing after the others who followed became her normality.

After saying goodbye to the Baudelaires, she sets off along the tree-lined avenue. It's spring, but winter has wedged into her bones. Despite numerous invitations, she will never set foot in that house again.

* * *

In her tenth year under cover at the Caligari Carnival, a message informs her that the inevitable happened. The Baudelaires perished in a terrible fire that broke out on the eighteenth anniversary of that fateful night at the opera.

Kit cries the last tears she has and so, when thirteen months later another message informs her of the death of the only family member she had, she has no more tears to shed. She entrusts her disguise of Madame Lulu to the inexperienced but clever and sagacious Olivia Caliban (another almost sister. In a more just life her family would have been a wonderful people) and wears the role of teacher in the Prufrock Preparatory School (and even if walking through the corridors and classrooms in which she herself learned the first important lessons of life, the magnificent library and the corner of the trophies, the ghosts of friends and companions of adventure haunt her, unwanted, this is a secret that belongs to her only and a pain with which she has learned to live together: it’s the testimony that she still has a heart, pulsating and functioning, along with a conscience and a soul not yet corrupted by regret).

* * *

The answer to the question that you will certainly have for yourself ( _can love truly end? Even when everything is lost or collapsed under the crumbling weight of too many errors and betrayals on both sides?)_ is in the sugar bowl. It has always been in the sugar bowl since Kit recovered it from the hospital and later from the Strikes Stream.

That "a tea set would be a handy place to hide anything important and small” is a universally recognized truth. The sugar bowl guards inside itself one and more secrets. The second most important is the heirloom that Kit hid inside during the escape from the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard.

A ring. To whose it belonged I can only know because I have taken care to hide it in the last safe place and yet it is not entirely true. The ring is the only object that I own of my mother and I will never know who gave it to her and why. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Will I be alone? When, within me, the intimate fire awakens that was the source of these storms and I am steady, free, alive, then will I be alone? And maybe I will rip out by the roots my postponed hope for love, I will remember that the fruit of every human limit is memory’s absence, which plunges me into becoming… But until I shiver from the touch of your hand, since yesterday my initiation, every sign of life that presses me lies unshaped within your fixed measures.
> 
> Alda Merini, Will I be alone?


End file.
